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Hugh Gaitskell (1906-1963): an Assessment

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Hugh Gaitskell (1906-1963): an Assessment HUGH GAITSKELL (1906-1963): AN ASSESSMENT John Saville The British Labour Party, since its early days, has always been a party of social reform whose ideas and policies have been largely articulated within a socialist rhetoric. There are certain crucial differences, at least in theory, between a party of social reform and a reformist socialist party. The former, whatever its social basis, may be defined as a party within a political democracy whose aims and purposes are the introduction of social reform into the existing structure of capitalist society; and whose objectives in no way challenge the fundamental property relationships of that society. A reformist socialist party, by contrast, is one whose long-term perspectives are the transformation of capitalism into one or other versions of a socialist society, to be accomplished through the steady modification of existing institutions, and by parliamentary means. The rhetoric and terminology of reformist parties are socialist; their practice is invariably moderate, involving piecemeal social change. These reformist socialist parties always have a Right, Centre and Left within their organisations, and it is, of course, the Left which will especially emphasise the long-term objectives of a socialist transformation. On these definitions the British Labour Party, once it adopted the Constitution of 1918, has been a reformist socialist party whose practice in and out of office has been discrete social reform. Those who established the Labour Representation Committee in 1900-which became the Labour Party in 1906-inherited a body of ideas which were the Fabian version of liberal collectivism. The crucial assumptions may be summarised as the use of state power to remedy social injustice and, as far as practicable, social inequality; a neutral theory of the State which involved a passionate belief in the primacy of Parliament, and in the possibilities of absolute control by a working-class party once an electoral majority was assured; a firm conviction that there were 'rules of the game' to which all responsible political parties would adhere. For those who were the architects of the Labour Party in the early twentieth century, whatever their particular commitment to any particular version of socialist doctrine, a parliamentary majority equalled state power; and the history of the widening political democracy in Britain before 1900 was for them ample justification for their argument. The basic assumption about political behaviour has always been the firm 148 HUGH GAITSKELL: AN ASSESSMENT 149 conviction that political parties will play the parliamentary game according to its traditional rules; and this is interpreted to mean that Conservatives will accept the will of the majority at a general election, and will not seek to subvert that will. But the thesis went further in the belief that there were no forces in society that would be able to withstand effective political control emanating from a majority government at Westminster. C.R. Attlee, leader of the Labour Party between 1935 and 1955, made explicit these ideas in a book written in 1937: his most radical political years, it may be noted: The Labour Party opposesGovernment policy, and seeks to convert the country to its point of view, but it does not carry on a campaign of resistance, passive or active, to hinder the ordinary functions of government being carried on. It accepts the will of the majority, which has decided that the country shall be governed by a Capitalist government, and it expects its opponents to do the same when it is returned to power. There are certain corollaries of this general thesis that need emphasis. The argument embodies the assurance that since real power resides in those who control Parliament, the owners of economic wealth and strength can either be legislated out of existence, or effectively curbed and regulated. It follows, if these things are true, that there is no basis for the concept of class struggle as in any way central to the dynamics of capitalist society. 'Interests' there are, of course; and many such interests will be so selfishly motivated that only the most stringent management and administration will curtail their anti-social effects. But this is far from any comprehension of the meaning of class struggle; and it has always, therefore, been possible for the Labour Party, and more particularly, the Labour Party leadership to think and talk and act in terms of national interest rather than in terms of working-class or socialist interest. And this approach-the concept of national interest-has found expression in many different ways, from the explicit statements of Ramsay Macdonald on the eve of the first minority Labour Government in 1924 to Attlee's return from Potsdam in 1945, when he recalled 'that our American friends were surprised to find that there was no change in our official advisers, and that I had taken over with me [as my Private Secretary] Leslie Rowan, who had served Churchill in the same capacity'.' There are two other consequences of the 'national interest' approach that need emphasis One, the supposed neutrality of the civil service, has already been suggested. The other, the identification of Labour leadership with the Conservatives over matters of foreign policy, is of great importance and significance, and establishes the limitations of the social parameters within which a Labour administration allows itself to operate. The conflict over appeasement towards the Fascist powers in the 1930s temporarily obscured what had already been an agreement over funda- 150 THE SOCIALlST REGISTER 1980 mentals before 1933; and it was during and after the Second World War that the acceptance of consensus in foreign affairs began to be taken for granted. After 1945, for a number of additional reasons this meant a position of subservience to the demands of American foreign policy, and although the reformist left wing of the Labour Party has usually had a different approach and stance, it has rarely been influential as a pressure group, and never effective against the basic conformity of the Labour leader ship with Conservative assumptions and policies. There have been certain exceptions-the important matter of Indian independence is one-but in no area of parliamentary politics is the impact of socialist rhetoric so feeble as it is in foreign affairs; and in no period has this been so striking as the last 20 years. The most important achievement of British labour in the twentieth century, now rapidly being undermined by the Thatcher Government, was the progressive incorporation of welfare policies into social life. The political strength, density and cohesiveness of the propertied classes in Britain have always been so powerful that advances in social welfare have come about only after intense political struggles; and the bitterness of the conflict has led many outside the Labour Party, as well as those within its ranks, to exaggerate what in practice has been obtained. Social welfare is quite commonly identified with socialism, and this supposed correspondence has been much fostered by successive Labour leaderships. What is remarkable here is the poverty of social-democratic theory in this, as in other contexts, and equally remarkable has been the failure of the Left, within and without the Labour Party, to offer a popular alternative: popular in the sense of its penetration into popular consciousness. The leadership of the British Labour Party has undergone interesting, indeed significant changes in its social composition over the past eighty years. The Party emerged in the early years of the twentieth century out of the political alliance of the trade unions with numerically small groups of socialists; and it was the socialists who largely engineered the break with liberalism and the Liberal Party. Their support in the country at large was working-class and most of the leaders were of working-class origin, as were the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party down to the Second World War. Within the Parliamentary Labour Party there has taken place, however, a gradual shift towards an increasingly influential middle-class stratum, professionally or university educated; and the change has been especially marked since 1945. It is not argued here that social origins are more than one factor in a constellation of complex forces determining political attitudes, or the balance of political forces within a Party of the Left. But life styles, and their changes over time, are not unimportant, and in the case of the subject of this present essay-Hugh Gaitskell-we have one of the more extreme examples of a Labour politician whose origins were far removed from the working people his Party was in existence to HUGH GAITSKELL: AN ASSESSMENT 15 1 represent, and whose own upper-middle-class life style was in no way altered throughout his adult years. The recent biography of Hugh Gaitskell by Philip Williams provides the opportunity for a re-appraisal. The work has been executed on a massive scale: 787 pages of text with another 212 pages of notes and index; and whatever the merits or otherwise of the volume, it offers an immense quarry for future research workers into the history of the Labour Party in the middle decades of the twentieth ~entury.~ Gaitskell had almost no experience of the life of the Labour Party at its local levels, or of the wider movement in general. In this he was similar to Wilson, and unlike all the Labour Party leaders who preceded him: Keir Hardie, Ramsay Macdonald, Lansbury and Attlee. His father was an Indian civil servant, working mostly in Burma, and the family had a long tradition of senrice in the army. Gaitskell was educated at an upperclass prep school in Oxford, and then went to Winchester, a haven for the sons of the professional upper middle class which was supposed to be somewhat more intellectual than the general run of public schools Winchester's impact on Gaitskell, according to his own account, was emotionally and intellectually stultifying.
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